Ghost stories: Sailor tells the tale of a ship with a shadow

As thoughts turn to the supernatural on Hallowe'en, writer Horatio Clare
remembers a chilling tale told to him at sea

"The sea is still a superstitious place, you see."Photo: ALAMY

By Horatio Clare

8:00AM GMT 31 Oct 2013

The giant bulk-carrier was moored at Hunterston Terminal, in Ayrshire, Scotland. The Second Mate was a young man then.

"Have you ever been there?" he asks me. He is not such a young man now.

I shake my head.

"Bleak," he says. "There's nothing."

We are crossing the Atlantic on a container ship as he tells me his story, heading into a storm. It is winter and the whole angry ocean is an infinity of welling grey swells. You cannot help seeing death in every one. When a big thumper hits us hard, you struggle not to see malice in it. Our poor old freighter judders and strains.

The Second Mate says he loves storms. "Better than boredom," he smiles. He has been 35 years at sea. He refuses promotion because he does not fancy the stress. He does not roll when he walks, but moves with a knee-bent shuffle, like a sea-tramp, mooching around the bridge, from the chart to the radar to the log-book, apparently purposeless.

Only when you have shared his watch do you realise that the shuffle makes him wonderfully stable, and that his mooching is efficiency, carrying him through the duties of the watch automatically, as our brave ship follows her course. The bridge tips, shudders and pitches, and we steam into the storm.

I slide and grab, making tea. The ting-ting of the spoon is an odd counterpoint to the moaning gale around the bridge. We take our seats on either side of the main control.

"We were moored at Hunterston," the Second Mate continues. "A jetty a mile long, a couple of cranes - we were unloading iron ore for the steelworks. And I knew it was a strange ship when I went on, but I didn't know it was an evil ship."

We will not name her. We will call her the Bulker, after her trade, the bulk carriage of coal and iron ore. The sea is still a superstitious place, you see. Humans on land may think they change, but we are always the same at sea. The oceans are tumults of memories, many treasured, and many wilfully drowned.

Won't you come aboard? Climb the teetering gangway of the Bulker, as she waits at the end of that stark jetty on that empty shore. She seems deserted, as all big cargo ships do. Their vastness swallows their crews.

"My Mum had come up to see me," the Second Mate remembers. "All the way from the Tyne. And she'd been on lots of ships, loads - Dad was a harbour pilot. But at the end of the jetty she takes one look and says, 'I'm not going on that ship.'"

When you are this close, a 90,000-ton ship like the Bulker fills the sky, fills the whole world. The hull is a steel cliff. Way up, the superstructure and its little portholes are her face, like the face of a house, and at the very top the bridge screens are her eyes. The whole looks down - on you.

"She just kept saying 'no' but she'd come all that way - in the end I almost dragged her."

The ship house is tight corridors, strip light and the smells of heavy diesel, men's sweat and school dinners. You could be in a prison or a hostel. There is no view, no sea air. Doors slam heavily. Shy men nod brief welcomes.

"She comes into my cabin, sits down and won't move. The Captain offers her a tour of the ship. Doesn't want it."

A tour is a mile of deck, holds big enough to drown villages in, and the mighty, infernal realm of the engine room, where the roar and heat of the machinery feel like thuggish fists drumming in your head.

"She just stays there until it's time to go home. This was before the internet, so she couldn't have looked it up, she couldn't have known."

"Known what?" I say.

"I said to her, 'What's all this about Mum?' and she said, 'Something terrible happened on this ship.' She said, 'Men died on this ship.' And they had. A man went mad - killed some of his mates with a knife. I knew about it but she couldn't have done, so I said, 'How do you know?'"

The Second Mate pauses again and sips his tea. The waves are bigger yet, great black-crested monsters, fattening out of the northwest as night comes up behind us.

"I said 'How do you know men died on this ship?' and she says, 'I can see them.'"

And I do not know whether you believe in ghosts or not, gentle reader, as I wish you happy Hallowe'en. But on that ship, as we went into that storm, I do know I did, then.

Horatio Clare's 'Down to the Sea In Ships' is published in January by Chatto & Windus